Field of the Disclosure
Embodiments of the disclosure generally relate to the production of crude oil and, more particularly, to the determining the concentration of salt in crude oil.
Description of the Related Art
The production of crude oil may involve a number of processes engineered to produce crude oil to specific quality specifications. For example, such quality specifications may specific a maximum amount of salt permitted in crude oil. Thus, the production of crude oil may include processes and techniques to remove salt from crude oil. In some instances, the amount of salt in produced crude oil may be manually monitored by sampling crude oil from the shipped crude pipeline and at time intervals. The sampled crude oil may be titrated with a reference alkaline solution to measure crude salinity. The results of the sampling may provide the amount of salt in crude oil after the crude oil has been produced. However, such sampling may only be used to reactively change process parameters to improve crude oil quality. Moreover, such manual sampling may be tedious and time-consuming and only detects deterioration in crude oil quality after it has occurred in the time interval between samplings.